Several models of external collaboration have taken shape in the always changing, rapidly innovating software industry over the last few decades. Much can be learnt from this industry on the models of external collaboration that might be suitable for other scenarios as well.
The open source community is strong and continues to challenge the proprietary initiatives in the software industry. Linux operating system, adopted worldwide at a large scale on computer systems is the starting of the dominant and most popular cases of the marvels and miracles achieved by open source community. In 1991, thousands of volunteer software developers collaborated with a student, Linus Torwalds who placed his software modules open for anyone willing to contribute and develop code under the GNU General public license. There is no stopping to this movement since then. The history of evolution of the open source community model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software_development) and several other team collaborations adopting various software development techniques are beyond the scope of this post. Today, at the Top Coder (topcoder.com), more than a million coders around the world come together for similar crowdsourcing initiatives. Google’s mobile phone operating system Android (based on Linux kernel) is yet another case of open source initiative by Google.
The software and information systems industry have learnt much from systems thinking and analysis (feasibility study) and several design patterns from the systems engineering approaches of manufacturing and other engineering disciplines.
Whether the case of following the example of open source community is relevant and feasible for external collaboration is a more challenging question. Companies can explore the feasibility by systematically analyzing of why crowdsourcing is useful and resolves their problem at hand, what they can crowdsource, and how they can approach the initiative.
The open source community is strong and continues to challenge the proprietary initiatives in the software industry. Linux operating system, adopted worldwide at a large scale on computer systems is the starting of the dominant and most popular cases of the marvels and miracles achieved by open source community. In 1991, thousands of volunteer software developers collaborated with a student, Linus Torwalds who placed his software modules open for anyone willing to contribute and develop code under the GNU General public license. There is no stopping to this movement since then. The history of evolution of the open source community model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software_development) and several other team collaborations adopting various software development techniques are beyond the scope of this post. Today, at the Top Coder (topcoder.com), more than a million coders around the world come together for similar crowdsourcing initiatives. Google’s mobile phone operating system Android (based on Linux kernel) is yet another case of open source initiative by Google.
The software and information systems industry have learnt much from systems thinking and analysis (feasibility study) and several design patterns from the systems engineering approaches of manufacturing and other engineering disciplines.
Whether the case of following the example of open source community is relevant and feasible for external collaboration is a more challenging question. Companies can explore the feasibility by systematically analyzing of why crowdsourcing is useful and resolves their problem at hand, what they can crowdsource, and how they can approach the initiative.
